just a litle link to a piece on the ultimate scam....
For You, Half Price - New York Times: "Since the bridge was completed in 1883, the idea of illegally selling it has become the ultimate example of the power of persuasion. A good salesman could sell it, a great swindler would sell it, and the perfect sucker would fall for the scam.
But this was not just a rhetorical or a fictional conceit. A turn-of-the-century confidence man named George C. Parker actually sold the Brooklyn Bridge more than once. According to Carl Sifakis, who tells his story in 'Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles,' Parker - who was also adept at selling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty and Grant's Tomb - produced impressive forged documents to prove that he was the bridge's owner, then convinced his buyers that they could make a fortune by controlling access to the roadway. 'Several times,' Mr. Sifakis wrote, 'Parker's victims had to be rousted from the bridge by police when they tried to erect toll barriers.'"
In writing his book "Hustlers and Con Men: An Anecdotal History of the Confidence Man and His Games," Jay Robert Nash interviewed an elderly swindler named Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil, who said he had known several criminal vendors of the bridge. Mr. Weil, whom Mr. Nash visited in a Chicago nursing home and described as "probably the greatest con man of the 20th century," recalled a swindler named Reed C. Waddell, who worked the bridge swindle in the 1880's and 1890's. Mr. Weil also claimed to know Waddell's successors in that trade, the notorious Charles and Fred Gondorf.